NOTE: This meeting will replace IMC SD's usual Breakfast Meeting at the Courtyard for April.

Business Intelligence: What Every Management Consultant Needs to Know

Join us for a Special Evening/Dinner Meeting of the San Diego Chapter of the Institute of Management Consultants, hosted jointly with the Association of IT Professionals. Our two presenters, Ellen Bonnell and Sam Tawfik, are experts at the forefront of the Business Intelligence movement.

Business Intelligence is an increasingly important part of the landscape for Management Consultants, as organizations rely on new approaches to develop strategy and make decisions. BI is filtering into process and practice at all levels, from the CEO in the war room to the junior customer support rep on the phone. BI means a major transformation in the way organizations will operate and do business, and is a key nexus between business and technology. Both consultants focused on strategy and planning, as well as technologists, will want to learn more about it.

Topics covered will include:

The vast new opportunities for businesses who know how to turn data into intelligence.

How to properly evaluate data-centric client requirements.

The amount of data is growing at staggering rates. What is being done both to manage those data, and to mine them for gold -- rather than getting buried in them?

Ellen Bonnell,the Founder of TrendSavants is an expert in Analytics, Forecasting, Business Intelligence and Supply Chain Systems. Ellen created the company in 1985 to provide consulting to clients who leverage data, technology and well-defined business processes to create competitive advantage. These clients include Toyota, Mazda, Nissan, Qwest, Coca Cola Bottling Companies, Baskin-Robbins and Taco Bell. She is equally at home at a port, in a warehouse or in the office developing statistical models.

Ellen is known for her creative thinking and problem solving. She has a unique approach to supply chain forecasting: she combines time series models, multivariate insights, and the knowledge that every business is unique and the practicalities of working with imperfect data. She is well known for delivering highly accurate ways to reduce the complexities of supply chain and labor management.

Ellen began her career at Nielsen in Statistical Research. At Gould, Inc. Fluid Components Division she was responsible for global distribution systems. As a Management Consultant with Deloitte, she developed both strategic and operational systems in distribution, manufacturing and health care industries.

Ellen completed her Bachelor of Science degree in Business Economics from Indiana University and Masters of Business Administration coursework from Northwestern University. She is a sought-after speaker and popular instructor of Analytics at the University of California at San Diego Extended Studies.

Sam Tawfik, Marketing Manager at Teradata has been with the company over 20 years and is currently the Product Marketing Manager for Teradata Viewpoint, Teradata Workload Management, and Business Intelligence Optimization. Sam has extensive data warehousing, business intelligence, enterprise application architecture, and systems integration, and his technical experiences include large scale data warehousing, application development, and enterprise integration architecture.

Sam’s work experiences include software engineering, systems integration consulting skills, project management, pre-sales technical consulting, product evangelism, marketing, and partner development. Sam has over 25 years in information technology experiences and received his undergraduate degree in Computer Science from California State University, Fullerton. Sam has presented at major Teradata, IBM, HP, and BEA conferences.

Teradata is the world's leading analytic data solutions company focused on integrated data warehousing, big data analytics, and business applications that provide actionable business intelligence